Ill Wind

by Nevada Barr

  For a time she leaned back against the seat, glad to be still. “Nights in White Satin” played on the oldies station out of Durango. Through the open window the air blew cool, smelling of juniper and dust. Overhead, without the pollution of the glaring intruder lights that had become epidemic even in remote areas during the last decade, the stars were fixed in an utterly black sky. Small night sounds kept the dark from being lonely. Anna could hear scufflings of some nocturnal creature digging in the pine needles, the sigh of a breeze approaching through the forest’s crown, clicking and snapping as tiny twigs or bones were broken.

  Only humans, cursed with the knowledge of their own mortality and that of those whom they loved, were truly alone; each trapped in an ivory tower of skull and bone peeking out through the windows of the soul.

  THE body recovery, as sanitized language would phrase it, had gone on till afternoon. The packaging of the meat that had once called itself Stacy Meyers had taken only a few minutes, but the attendant crime-scene recording and preservation had worn on so long even Hills’ deep-seated nerve endings had become frayed.

  Hills had even less experience than Anna with foul play in the form of park corpses, and his plodding methodical-ness took a definite turn toward the anal retentive. Pictures were taken and retaken from every angle.

  “Don’t know when somebody’s going to pop up out of the woodwork saying how you should’ve done it,” he explained. “So by God we’re going to do it all. Hell of a note. Where are the feds when you need ’em? We forget something and our tit’s in the wringer.”

  This and more of the same was muttered in an ongoing monotone as he directed the investigation. After the photographs, stones around the kiva were examined, swept, and the leavings collected in a plastic bag that Anna dutifully marked KIVA DUST with the date and her initials.

  “Maintain the chain of evidence,” Hills said.

  “It’s dirt,” Anna returned.

  “You never know . . .”

  The kiva floor was photographed, re-raked, all items bagged and marked. Then, finally, Stacy was photographed and zipped into the body bag. His hat and shoes wouldn’t fit in the narrow plastic shroud. Anna threw them in the trunk of her car to return to Rose.

  The entire “dog and pony show,” as Hills termed it, had taken several hours. During most of it Stacy lay curled absurdly in the fire pit, reaching toward something the living couldn’t see, his beard growing ever blacker with flies.

  It was odd how the human mind switched off an unpleasant reality. Moose slept seconds at a time, their brains clicking on and off like binary computers, allowing them to rest yet never be long out of a dangerous world in need of watching. Anna, Jimmy, Drew, Paul, Jennifer, they’d all clicked in and out of the reality of death in the kiva. Jokes were told, people laughed, measurements were taken, even mild flirting between Jennifer and Paul.

  Interspersed with this flow of life were chalky looks, strained silences, and equally strained conversations as someone saw again Stacy’s face, remembered his wife, his child, recalled him as he had been in life, and woke to the realization that this fly-blown corpse was all that remained.

  The schizophrenia wore Anna down. She had already needed a drink in the worst way when Hills dragged her to Meyers’ house to give condolences to the widow.

  Blessedly he had foisted off the chore of informing Rose onto Frieda. Their visit was mere formality—courtesy, the East Texan said. “Leave any questions to the feds.”

  “The feds” Hills relied on so heavily was a federal investigator the superintendent had called in. Mesa Verde was under exclusive jurisdiction, which placed it off local law enforcement’s turf.

  The Meyerses’ house was shut up. Windows closed, blinds drawn like a Victorian house of mourning.

  Hills knocked tentatively then stepped back, leaving Anna marooned on the welcome mat as Rose opened the door. She was neatly dressed in dark blue polyester pants and a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Her short dark hair was combed and she wore pearl earrings, but her face was in disarray; dry eyes rimmed with red, her cheeks drawn and pale.

  Anna looked to Hills but he was studying a crack in the sidewalk. “We just stopped by to tell you how terribly sorry we are, Mrs. Meyers,” Anna managed. “Your husband’s body is being taken to Durango.”

  Rose waited. When Anna could find no more words, Rose closed the door. In the curtailed view of the living room there’d been no sign of Bella. For that Anna was grateful. The child would have been hard to face. She turned to Hills.

  He shrugged. “That about does it,” he said, and: “You’re off the clock.”

  “Overtime. You’re a real sensitive guy,” Anna groused as they walked back to the patrol car.

  “Gotta be thinking of something,” he said philosophically.

  ANNA raised the bottle from between her thighs and peered at it, measuring the level against the dull glow of the dashboard lights. One third left. Of how many bottles? she wondered. Surely this was only the second. Maybe the third.

  She took a mouthful and speculated on any possible New Age numerological significance that one third of the third might have. “Got to ask Jamie,” she said. “Wart-hog.” This last descriptive was triggered at the memory of her housemate.

  JAMIE had been hovering at the dormitory door when Hills dropped Anna off. Burke was decked out in the sarong, her hair, free of its braid, fanned into a crimped black curtain that fell past her butt. Kohl—or some modern equivalent—ringed her eyes and she wore a single gold earring beaten into the stylized shape of a lizard. Her face was somber but excitement radiated from her in tangible waves.

  “LIKE a bitch in heat,” Anna told the wine bottle.

  “WE’VE got to talk,” Jamie had said grimly.

  “Not now.” Anna had tried to squeeze by but Jamie’d laid hold of her briefcase.

  “Now.”

  Anna dropped her hat and gunbelt on the nearest chair. “So talk.”

  Jamie ignored her rudeness, or was too caught up in her own drama to notice it. With a sigh, she spread herself on the sofa. “Stacy and I were very close. Very.”

  Anna doubted that, but the declaration in no way surprised her. The dead had more friends than the living. Especially those meeting an untimely end. It was as if knowing a murder victim invested one with some sort of celebrity. Jamie had wanted something to happen on solstice. Murder must’ve been beyond her wildest dreams.

  Murder: Anna hadn’t said it to herself so bluntly. Suicide, accident, incident, those were the words Hills had resolutely stuck with all day. In thinking it, Anna believed it to be true. Stacy was too much a conservationist to defile the ruins with his twentieth-century corpse.

  “We all know dead people, Jamie,” Anna said unkindly. Then: “Sorry. I’m beat.” She picked up her duty belt and turned to go. Again the interpreter stopped her.

  “Claude saw,” she repeated her cryptic phrase of the morning, playing it like a trump card in her bid for attention.

  Anna was almost too tired to ante up but she managed a mild show of interest. “Saw what?”

  “The night Stacy was taken. He saw it.”

  The spark of interest flickered and died. Anna was too tired to play. “Get him to write ‘it’ up on his witness report.” She dragged herself to the questionable sanctuary of her room.

  The evening continued to unravel from there. Through the thin walls of the Far View dorm, Jamie could be heard holding court. Once—or maybe twice—Anna slunk from her lair to return with reinforcements in the form of alcohol. Finally, needing air, but unable to again run the gauntlet of avid faces greedy for details, she opened her window, popped off the screen, and climbed out, taking the last un-dead soldier with her.

  SHE poured wine into her mouth and a bit on her chin. “Quick,” she said as she closed her eyes and rested her head on the Rambler’s seat. “Red or white?” Could’ve been either. “Some palate.” She pushed open the car door. For a moment it was impossible to make any head
way. Then she remembered to undo her seatbelt and tumbled out.

  MOLLY picked up on the seventh ring. “What? What is it?” she demanded.

  “It’s just me.” Anna was mildly offended.

  “Where are you? What’s going on? Talk to me.” Molly rattled out the words.

  “Can’t,” Anna replied. “Can’t get a word in edgewise. Just called to chat.”

  There was a long silence devoid, for once, of the poisonous note of tobacco smoke sliding into dying lungs. Then Molly spoke very deliberately. “I don’t know what time zone you’re in, but here in the civilized world it’s three twenty-seven in the morning. If you’re okay, you’d better lie to me. Tell me something dire enough to warrant this rude awakening.”

  Three twenty-seven. Anna pushed the tiny silver button on her watch and squinted at the lighted dial. It was hopeless. The numbers were small and furry. “That can’t be right,” she said.

  “Trust me on this one.” A sigh: the cigarette. “Begin at the beginning, Anna. Before your first drink.”

  Anna started to cry, great whooping sobs that hurt her throat. Tears poured down her face, dripped from her jaw. “Zach’s dead,” she barked when she was able. Her sister said nothing, choosing not to try and override the storm of grief.

  When finally she quieted, Molly said, “That’s right, Zach’s dead. Been dead a long time. Kids born the day he died are old enough to rob liquor stores. What’s going on, Anna?”

  “Zach?” Anna was confused.

  “You said Zach was dead.”

  Anna digested that for a moment, taking a little wine and letting it burn under her tongue. “No I didn’t,” she said at last. “Stacy’s dead. Stacy Meyers.”

  “Who is Stacy Meyers?”

  “Goddamn it, listen to me!” Anna screamed.

  “You’re drunk, Anna,” her sister said reasonably. “I love you—Lord knows why—and I want to help you. But you’re beyond me. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  The line went dead. Anna laid her head on the desk and wept.

  TEN

  CONSCIOUSNESS DAWNED LIKE A FOGGY DAY. ANNA opened her eyes. She was facedown on a rough brown surface, her cheek wet from drool, and she was terribly cold. Thin gray light filtered from somewhere. Through the static in her head she could hear the fussy chatter of scrub jays.

  Without moving, as though to do so might prove dangerous, she took stock of the situation. She was lying on the front seat of the Rambler, her clothes rumpled and damp. Pins and needles prickled through her right arm and leg where they were pinned under her. Graying hair, clumped and sticky-looking on the vinyl, fell around her face.

  Slowly she raised her head. Her first instinct had been right: to move was dangerous. Even her eyeballs ached. Her mouth was so dry her tongue rattled between her teeth like the clapper in a bell.

  She pushed herself to a sitting position. The sun was not yet up. The Rambler was still parked in front of the Resource Management Office. The car and her hair reeked of stale wine. Anna checked her wristwatch: five thirty-five.

  She shoved her stinking locks back with both hands. “What the fuck happened to me?”

  The keys were in the ignition. She slid over behind the wheel and tried the starter. There wasn’t even a whimper of life. When she’d stumbled out the night before, she had left the ignition on as well as the radio and the lights. “Lucky for me and God knows who else.” Her head dropped back against the seat and she grunted with the ache of it.

  The last thing she remembered was dialing Molly’s number in New York. She wondered what she had said.

  Tires humming on the pavement brought her back into the present. Soon the park would begin to stir, archaeologists on their way to the lab, the tree kids toting chain saws into the woods to remove hazardous fuels, helitack jogging by on physical training, maintenance men, trail crew, tourists.

  Panic tore the fog of alcohol clouding her mind. This was no way to greet the public. Balancing her head carefully on her shoulders, she retraced her steps to the Resource Management Office. The door was unlocked and open. Inside, on one of the desks, was a bottle with half an inch of red wine in the bottom. Mercifully it was upright and the resource management specialist’s nest of papers unbesmirched by her night’s debauchery. The bookcase had not fared so well. It was overturned and the books hurled around the room. Memory, like a snapshot, flashed in Anna’s mind: her hands pulling the shelves toward her, books and periodicals cascading down over her feet.

  Why she had done it, what she’d been looking for or trying to prove, remained a mystery.

  She dropped to her knees, righted the bookcase, then crawled after its contents and restored them in what she hoped was relative order. Having finger-combed her matted hair and braided it off her face, she tied it with a piece of pink plastic surveyor’s tape she’d found in the office.

  Putting on the best face—and the best lie on it—she could, she walked the mile through the woods to the helitack dorm. Paul Summers drove her back in the fire truck and jump-started the Rambler.

  Driving back to Far View, Anna felt weak-kneed and queasy. A strong sense of God not being in Her heaven and all’s wrong with the world pervaded every cell of her body. Not only the hangover shook her, but the hours in blackout. A chunk of time she’d been active, talking, walking, evidently hurling research manuals, was utterly alien to her. A black hole she’d fallen into and, but for a dead battery, might never have crawled out of.

  A hot shower steamed the booze from her pores and rinsed it from her hair but not even hot coffee could burn the fumes from her brain. As she pulled on her uniform, she hoped no great feats of kindness, courage, or intellect would be required of her for a few days. She longed to call Molly, but embarrassment combined with the need to sort things out on her own stayed her hand.

  Purposely avoiding the Museum Loop, the chief ranger’s office, and most of the visitors, Anna patrolled the traditionally uneventful four and a half miles from Far View Lodge to Park Point, the highest place in the park at 8,571 feet. The twisting road to the mesa cut through the flanks of mountains in two places, Bravo Cut and Delta Cut. Rocks falling from the unstable hillsides littered the roadway and were a constant headache. After rains the rocks were numerous and sizable enough to present a hazard to motorists. Delta Cut, the higher of the two, presented a slashed hillside to the town of Cortez far below. Held in by a metal railing, the road ran along a ragged drop edged with thickets of oakbrush. Today Anna found nothing but pebbles, none even as big as a woman’s fist. Still she parked the car and meticulously began kicking each little rock off the asphalt.

  It felt good to be quiet and alone and in the sunlight.

  Bit by bit her mind cleared and she thought of Stacy Meyers. Not of Stacy Meyers the man, with his intellectual charm and heartfelt commitment to the land—that would have led her back to those lost hours in the Resource Management building. Anna thought of the “Meyers Incident,” reducing it to a puzzle, a mystery that, unlike mysteries of the heart, might prove solvable.

  On the grounds of woman’s intuition she’d been quick to discount suicide but it was a real possibility and one that would have to be explored. Stephanie McFarland came to mind and Anna remembered Stacy’s anguish at panicking. Could he have decided he no longer deserved to live? To a sane mind, it seemed excessive, but Anna knew from experience depression could breathe an insane logic into the most bizarre courses of action.

  Anna knew very little of Stacy’s inner life, or, as Molly would say, his real life. It was clear that he had financial problems. Short of a generous trust fund, any temporary GS-5 with grown-up responsibilities would have money problems. Stacy’s were exacerbated by Bella’s needs and Rose’s wants.

  Would he fake his own murder to provide for them? Anna took out the yellow notebook she carried in her hip pocket and wrote “Life Insurance?” on the first clean page. She had worked a couple of suicide investigations in the past and dreaded them. In many ways they were more destructive t
o those left living than homicide. Always, with unnatural death, came anger. Homicides had a healthy target, a suitable bad guy, a foe worthy of hatred. Suicide carried the same furious baggage but it fed on the bearer. As widowhood was said to be easier than divorce, so murder was easier than suicide. At least no one chose to leave.

  The other possibilities were accident, natural causes, murder, and, if Jamie had her way, vengeful intervention of spirits. Hills was overwhelmingly in favor of the first idea but even he, faced with the neatly placed hat and doffed shoes, had to admit that: “If it was an accident it sure was a lulu.”

  Anna harbored a secret preference for the Revenge of the Anasazi. Paranormal foul play would be a nice diversion from man’s daily inhumanity to man.

  Foul Play: Anna smiled at the phrase and flicked a stone off the roadway with the side of her foot. It sounded so English, so Old School, implying subtle distaste for something not quite cricket, not entirely sporting. Homicide had an American feel, a businesslike violence-as-usual ring to it. Anna preferred Foul Play. She said it once aloud. In the gentle silence of a summer’s day spoken words grated and she didn’t try it again.

  The sun was warm on her back, and a breeze, blowing across from the snow-covered peaks of the Abajos a hundred miles away in Utah, smelled gloriously of nothing. Up high there was only air in the air and Anna took a moment to fill her lungs to capacity.

  If one must think of murder, this was the kind of day to do it: a pure day, one without guile.

  Murder, then; the motives were usually predictable. Somebody got mad, got greedy, or got even. The pathologically neat arrangement of the scene seemed to rule out a crime of passion. Those killed in the sudden heat were customarily found sprawled and bloody in bedrooms, bar-rooms, on kitchen floors, and in parking lots.